Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Dead Retconning

Spider-Man Brand New Day
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton
USA/Canada/UK/Germany 2026
Columbia Studios
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: A whole webful of spoilers in this one. You were warned!

Well I was fully expecting Spider-Man: Brand New Day to be absolutely terrible but, instead, I found myself pleasantly surprised by this movie. If a little confused about the direction it takes. Or make that very confused. 

Okay, so all that stuff in Spider-Man: No Way Home where the whole world forgot who Peter Parker was, surely must have been to give Columbia Pictures, who wanted Spider-Man back for their own films, a brand new start and, presumably, to not have them have to pick up the cheques for certain regular actors in the current Spider-Man continuity but... nope. I suspect that was the idea when that film was released... to allow Columbia to sever all ties with the Disney owned Marvel but, I dunno, something must have happened. Maybe a studio or department head left or, heck, given the failure of most of their other Spider-Man spin offs such as Morbius (reviewed here), Madame Web (reviewed here) and Kraven The Hunter (reviewed here), perhaps they finally realised they can’t make a profitable Spider-Man movie without Marvel’s involvement. 

Good move because I’m already hearing this latest one is breaking all box office expectations and, the way this film plays out, it looks like Marvel and Columbia have made a truce and are ready to loan all their toys out to each other and let each other play in their backyards for a while. And from here on in I’m going into spoiler territory folks so... again... you were warned. 

So we have Tom Holland, Zendaya and Jacob Batalon back as Peter Parker, MJ and Ned Leeds respectively. And the long game on the story beats seems to be to somehow reset this small unit back to what it was in the MCU films. I mean, it doesn’t completely reset to the status quo but you can certainly see how it can only be a matter of time. 

And, also joining them from the Marvel Cinematic Universe are Florence Pugh as... well, I guess she’s Black Widow now, Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/Hulk and Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle (aka The Punisher). However, here’s the big spoiler, people... making her MCU/Columbia character debut in this film we have Sadie Sink as... Jean Grey. Yup... Marvel Girl herself is in this after having previously been played by both Famke Janssen and Sophie Turner in a number of different X-Men films each. And not only that, she’s kind of set up as the main villain in this movie... two things wrong with that, as far as I’m concerned.

Firstly, the character is mostly portrayed as dark and damaged in exactly the same kind of way that Lewis Pullman’s character in Thunderbolts* was. Which means that it could be very easy for Marvel to... for the third time in the cinema and when they deem fit... do a more convincing version of the Dark Phoenix storyline. Which means, if they do that, another character which will very much be needed in the MCU’s new X-Men line up just made her debut here. 

Secondly, we all know that for many years (decades) before that storyline which has her become a danger and threat to the entire universe, resulting in her death (if memory serves, before the inevitable comic book style resurrection some time later), she was actually one of the good guys... er gals... as one of the original The Uncanny X-Men. So, yeah, once the audience realise who she is playing... well it’s then that most of them will surely realise that the villain is a huge red herring and that the real villain is, of course, Damage Control. Alas, once again in MCU continuity, this organisation is not being headed up by Tyne Daley as it was in Spider-Man: Homecoming (reviewed here). So yeah, bad things are afoot with Damage Control but, effectively, the main villainess of the movie is Jean Grey, as a kind of surrogate villain. 

But, it’s a nice film and has a good warm heart at its centre. Oh... and if people were upset by Spider-Man: No Way Home (reviewed here) in that it killed off Aunt May... well she’s still dead but Marisa Tomei is back to play out a flashback sequence which actually has a big impact to the resolution of the story arc here, actually. 

And there are some other politics at play too, I think. I don’t like where they’ve left Bruce Banner’s conclusion here and I am hoping they’ve put him in this place because it makes sense to have him there when needed a few years down the line. Probably a political move on the part of the two studios, I would think.

But, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a pretty good film, all told... having some heart breakingly good performances and completely destroying my expectations, I’m glad to say. They’ve even brought back composer Michael Giacchino to score it but, he does a strange thing here. I think the four years which have passed in loneliness for Peter Parker must be the reason why he’s adjusted the leitmotif for the character. He’s stripped his main, six note theme down to just four notes. simplifying it for the whole of the movie until, with certain resolutions down the line, he returns to the old six note theme in the end credits sequence. Nice.

As always with the Marvel movies this one has a post-credits sequence and, it’s non-commital enough to have an ending which tells you one specific thing without giving anything away. And that’s to show that Spider-Man has gone into space and is on another planet. Which could be a hint to the next stand alone movie or... well... it could mean that we’ll be seeing Tom Holland again in either Avengers: Doomsday this December or, more likely, Avengers: Secret Wars in December 2027. And that’s it. I was expecting Columbia to fumble the ball big time with the Spider-Man franchise but Spider-Man: Brand New Day really does deliver the goods (and is still a lot better than Spider-Man: Far From Home (reviewed here). ‘Nuff Said!

*No, sorry, that asterisk wasn’t for the reader, it’s just part of the title of the movie. Relax.

Now You See Me, Now You Don't

Augmented Unreality

Now You See Me, 
Now You Don't
Directed by Ruben Fleischer
USA/United Arab Emirates/
Canada/Hungary 2025 
Lionsgate Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some light spoilers.

Okay, so this third installment in the wonderful Now You See Me franchise feels a bit like a too little, too late kind of scenario, to be perfectly honest. And I can straight away say that I can understand why it’s not as well loved as the other two movies... frankly, it is the worst written of the three. But at least it finally has the title Now You See Me, Now You Don't... which is what we all wanted as the title for the second film.

But, that being said, the director manages to keep the ball rolling through most of the presentation and it never once gets dull. Clichéd and disappointing in places perhaps... but never dull.

Okay, so this is set around ten years since the last show staged by ‘The Four Horsemen’ and there’s an opening sequence where the four are back and performing for a crowd, using their stage act to rob from the criminally gained rich and give to the poor, once more. And here was my first disappointment... it felt a little off to me. And so I was pretty unsurprised by the first twist of the movie, that this was an AI representation of the horsemen being utilised to cash in on them (and seek an entrance) by a new group of three young magicians. 

So returning we have the original four horsemen played by Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco, Isla Fisher... we have the new three played by Dominic Sessa, Ariana Greenblatt and the always watchable Justice Smith. We also have Morgan Freeman returning and in a somewhat awful cameo at the end of the picture, Mark Ruffalo (who is sorely missed as a player in this). All coming together to foil the daughter of a nazi empire and her dirty diamonds, played by Rosamund Pike. 

Not to mention my favourite return guest... Lizzy Caplan... as the returning ‘other girl horseman’ Lula!

And it’s... kinda fun but, honestly, tips it’s hat one too many times, so to speak and... I don’t know... I can handle that the magic is somewhat faked in a lot of the scenes and there’s even a clever piece of sleight of hand played on the audience when Ariana Greenblatt escapes her captors due to a simple camera movement... but it’s not enough to make up for the somewhat hum drum story, I thought. 

I do have a couple of criticisms of the movie. Now, Isla Fisher’s character is really happy to see Morgan Freeman’s returning Thaddeus, even though in terms of the story, she has already left The Horseman by the time he turns out not to have been the villain after all (at the end of the second movie). So, yeah, considering the fact that nobody has really been keeping tabs on each other in the group (and despite the reason for them splitting being absolutely lacking in credibility)... she really shouldn’t have ben that happy to see what, to her, should have looked like a returning villain. 

Also, my other problem, is that for four people who are fugitives from the law at the end of the previous two movies... how are they able to hold a job down in every day life (Dave Franco’s character is a cruise ship magician, for example) without being picked up by the FBI or the police? It makes absolutely no sense people!

The one thing the film does, kinda, have going for it is the twist with the revelation of the identity of one of the characters at the end game of the film. This actually surprised me but... also disappointed me because it seemed so contrived and somewhat anticlimactic. It just all felt a little off and... meh. Even the Escher-like chase scene in a chateau seemed somewhat less than it should have been.

So Now You See Me Now You Don’t is not a dull film and I had some fun with it, especially as it’s once again all tied up with one of franchise composer Brian Tyler’s masterful scores (although, c’mon man, we need a proper CD release of the first and third film scores please). But that’s me done with it... the young cast are, mostly, not as irritating as they could be but I would have preferred the film without them in order to have more time with The Horsemen from the first two films. Not great but not terrible either.

Mickey 17

You’re So Fine
You Blow My Mind
Over 16 Times, Hey...

Mickey 17
Directed by Bong Joon Ho
South Korea/USA 2025
Warner Brothers
UK Cinema release print

Warning: Some spoilerage.

Okay... so I don’t mind a bit of Bong Joon Ho but I’ve only ever been totally blown away by him once and that was for his brilliant giant monster movie The Host. His new film, Mickey 17, is pretty much what I expected from him, to be honest (on the strength of the trailer) and I had a pretty good time with it while, not being too taken with it at the same time.

The premise is that, in the not too distant future, a failed buffoon of an American politician played by Mark Ruffallo, satirically playing him as a kind of amalgam of Trump and Musk (which is not a hard stretch to amalgamate the two, to be fair), accompanied by his wife (played by the ever reliable Toni Collette) and a huge starship full of colonists is off to found the colony of Nipple-heim on the planet of their choice. On board they take an expendable, who is a guy who can be reprinted from recycled rubbish and implanted with all his former memories... and his job is to be the ‘canary in the cage’ for the mission. If you can imagine a canary in a cage which is deliberately killed with agonising and sometimes slow death on purpose, to develop vaccines and so on, in the field.

The current Mickey is Mickey 17 and he’s played by an actor I’m not all that enamoured of, Robert Pattinson... although he does a great job here playing the title character (with a Jerry Lewis voice) and his copies, who all exhibit slightly different personalities. And we start off with him accidentally dropping into a perilous, non-survivable position, about to be eaten by creatures and being abandoned by his pal, played by Steven Yeun. From this point we flash back to get the back story as to why Mickey decided to volunteer to be an expendable in the first place, before we catch up to it again a short time later.

Meanwhile, the somewhat more over-confident (to the possible point of being almost psychotic) Mickey 18 has been 'printed'. However, Mickey 17 is instead saved by the native creatures and when he returns to the ship and to his girlfriend played by Naomi Ackie (who is more than happy to have two Mickeys to sleep with at the same time), he is now an illegal ‘multiple’.

And things get worse when the indigenous, slug/armadillo-like population are gathering to take revenge on a president who is allowing his wife to use their tails to make sauces for her cooking projects. It all gets quite gripping and suspenseful with each twist and turn and it certainly doesn’t get dull.

Pattinson and the cast are all good with some nice framing and editing going on. There are some nice ideas too, such as Mickey’s memories being backed up onto a brick etc and the 3D cloning printer jerking back and forth in the process of making a new Mickey (like a photocopier going back for another scan pass). And it is full of ideas, somewhat reminiscent of the kind of things Philip K. Dick would have been writing about in the 1950s and on to the end of his career for sure.

My biggest problem with the film is that, for all the ideas on show and explored throughout the fairly lengthy narrative, nothing really surprising ever happens. Even the somewhat benevolent nature of the alien life form on the planet is kinda telegraphed early on in the movie and so, to me at least, the film becomes more of an exercise in pulling the various narrative threads together into a sustained story without really coming off the rails. The film changes tonally on the drop of a dime, so to speak, weaving between moving drama and high comedy but, that stuff seems to fit okay together for the most part and... I dunno, it’s a good film but not a great one, is what I left the cinema thinking. I mean, I could let another ten or twenty years go by without ever visiting it again. That being said, I don’t know what it’s like as an adaptation of the book Mickey7 by Edward Ashton but it feels like it’s a novel I should definitely sit down and read at some point. Just to see how different it is and if the book is, maybe, more subtle than the big screen version.

And that’s me about done on Mickey 17, I think. It’s an okay film with some big concepts, great special effects and some nice acting choices. If you like science fiction (as opposed to just space opera) then you should have an okay time with it. An easy one to recommend but don’t expect anything much more than what it says on the tin, in this one.

She Hulk - Attorney At Law

Sensational Savage

She Hulk - Attorney At Law
2022 USA Marvel
9 episodes

Warning: If you read all these spoilers and complain about it after, I’m gonna rip up all your X-Men comics!

I’ve always has a soft spot for She-Hulk (or Shulkie, as she is often affectionately known). I first got into her when I was trying to recover from crippling RSI about 30 years ago and comic books were the only things I could keep held open at the time... so I rediscovered my comic book youth and also picked up a lot of old titles I’d missed out on, via a much better choice of shops where you could buy reasonably priced back issues than you could find these days. So I read... and this is the extent of my ‘old school’ She-Hulk knowledge... the first two incarnations of the comic book and the graphic novel which popped up between the two.

Now, a quick history of the character, as far as my experiences of her are... in the late 1970s, Stan Lee created the comic book The Savage She-Hulk, where Bruce Banner’s cousin, Jennifer Walters, gets a blood transfusion and manifests as a female version of Marvel’s popular The Incredible Hulk. Lee created the character to stop Universal, who were successful with their TV show based on the property, from spinning off their own female character which they would own outright, independent of Marvel. So while the initial, relatively short run of The Savage She-Hulk was pretty awful... in all honesty... it at least served it’s function. But then came a graphic novel entitled The Sensational She-Hulk, followed by a second attempt at the character, initially created by the hottest comic book sensation of the time, John Byrne... and that incarnation stuck and was a lot more successful.

This version of the character was breaking the fourth wall and talking to both the readers, not to mention her artists and writers, constantly... a long time before Deadpool was doing similar stuff. Indeed, the first cover has Shulkie talking directly to the readers and threatening to come and rip up their X-Men comics if they don’t buy her book this time around. The cover was parodied in an almost identical duplicate for the very last issue of this much longer, much more successful run... where Shulkie was declaring she was about to make good on her threat.

And the character was a complete joy to read and so, I was pretty cynical when Marvel launched a TV series, starring the excellent Tatiana Maslany as the central character. I thought, unless this character starts to frequently break the fourth wall, not to mention completely obliterating it by the final episode, then this would not be a good adaptation. Fortunately, I was dead wrong... this is probably the most ‘in the spirit of the original comic’ adaptation that Marvel have done for their MCU TV shows and, probably, for their movies too. Although Maslany doesn’t look a whole lot like the Jennifer Walters I knew, she’s got the character pitch perfect and her co-stars such as Ginger Gonzago and Renée Goldsberry are brilliant.

Asides from having a lot of references, some of them quite clever, to comics and pop culture in general, there are also a host of characters from the MCU (and former, reconstituted MCU) movies and films who cameo, quite strongly and significantly, in various episodes. So, of course you get Mark Ruffalo back as Jeniffer’s notorious cousin, accidentally infecting her with his virus to a lesser degree (she can change to her She-Hulk personality at will, retaining all her consciousness and intelligence... it’s literally just a physical transformation), there’s Tim Roth in quite a few episodes as Emil Blonsky, aka The Abomination (who tried to kill Edward Norton’s version of Banner in The Incredible Hulk movie, before Ruffalo replaced the actor), Charlie Cox as Daredevil and also, in some wonderful moments, Benedict Wong back as Wong from the Doctor Strange movies.

And Roth is absolutely hilarious as Blonsky, who has changed and become an ‘in touch with your feelings’ self help guru, who Jen has to defend and get out of prison. It also shows us exactly why he was battling Wong in a fight club in a cameo moment in Shang Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings (reviewed here). And everyone is great in this with about three main plot threads which all come together in the final episode (Jen even gets to have sex with Daredevil and now seems to be his new, regular girlfriend). And there’s even a beautifully ‘on topic’ reference (alas, not in any of the Daredevil scenes) of the term ‘fridging’, which is a popular shorthand saying for lazy ‘kill the girlfriend’ motivation story arcs which originated from something that happened in a Daredevil comic decades ago, if memory serves.

And, of course, the last episode truly lived up to my expectations when She-Hulk does not like the way her final episode is shaping up, criticising the lame way in which Marvel shows and films end with big confrontational battles, which somehow bury the loose plot ends and so, in fine She-Hulk fashion, she exits the episode through the Disney+ Marvel menu of the streaming channel and breaks out to go and have a word with the writers in the studio and the ‘robot’ head of the company K.E.V.I.N (obviously a reference to Kevin Feige... I would have preferred the actual person to make an appearance as he would have done in the comics) and gets her ending rewritten, exactly how she wants it. It’s hot stuff and I can see why lots of Marvel fan boys were whining and getting angry at the show, especially the last episode. All that really shows, though, is that they’re totally ignorant of the character and maybe they should have actually read some of the John Byrne issues to find out what they were letting themselves in for... at the very least.

Heck, the last episode even has a beautiful parody remake of the old The Incredible Hulk TV show opening title sequence... which was great and brought a smile to my face... especially the “Don’t make me angry... you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” line, which the show used to re-run in the titles every week. The whole thing is incredibly well done comedy and, yeah, it’s a different tone from the majority of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (other than Deadpool, obviously). I just had a wonderful time with it. My only real problem is that they didn't recreate the notorious 'naked skipping rope' sequence inspired by the fan letters in the comic book but, yeah, hopefully some day. I doubt, given the uproar the show caused, that there will be a second series but, yeah, I live in hope. She-Hulk Attorney At Law certainly deserves to keep going and I hope Marvel realise that they have made some interesting art here and not just go down the 'follow the money' route, so to speak. Good job to everyone involved and, yeah, a big recommendation from me here.

Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings

The Bride
Of Xu Wenwu

Shang-Chi And The
Legend Of The Ten Rings
USA/Australia 2021
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton
Marvel Studios

Warning: This has all the spoilers
so don’t read if you don’t want to know.

Okay... be patient and let me get this out of my system because this is nothing new for the way Marvel have been treating their rich source of characters in their film franchises. Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings is, allegedly, based on the old Marvel Shang-Chi, Master Of Kung Fu comic books. Now, it was never a title I read back in the 1970s but I do at least remember the one, very important thing about the character and it is this... Shang-Chi’s father in the comics was none other than Sax Rohmer’s embodiment of the ‘yellow peril’, Dr. Fu Manchu. This is something Marvel retconned, for some reason, at some point in the 21st Century incarnation of the comics but, come on... Marvel movies are owned by Disney now. Surely they could have afforded to pay the copyright to retain the infamous master villain for their new movie (who, incidentally, also doesn’t share the name of his father from the rebooted version of the comics either... go figure). Honestly, I am sick to death of Marvel not treating their characters with the respect they deserve. Not having Fu Manchu in this movie is as much of a crime against filmanity as when they excluded Doc Savage and the Amazing Five from the movie ‘adaptation’ of The Rocketeer. I mean, what is going on here? What a travesty! And just to rub it in, they’ve got one of the most respected Asian actors of our time, Tony Leung, in the role of the father and have named the character... wait for it... Xu Wenwu. Presumably because it rhymes with Fu Manchu. I mean... come on!

And you know what... I am so tempted to just end my review right there before I even get started with the conclusion that, once again, Marvel have screwed their own characters and not done right by them, not to mention completely disrespecting the audience who pay money to go and see movies based on comic book characters they love... only to see them in homogenised and commercialised forms because they presumably think this will bring them more money in. Personally, I think money is a terrible thing to measure success by and use to grant access to the continued production of an art form but... that’s why they call it the movie business I guess.

However, since the film isn’t absolutely terrible, I’ll now give a brief review because, although it’s not the slice of comic book genius I’d been misled into thinking it would be (honestly, it’s not the worst but I would say it’s maybe somewhere within the bottom three or four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies), it does have some entertaining sequences midst other, more draggy and dull scenes, to be sure.

Okay, so the plot is really simple. Simu Liu plays Shang-Chi and Awkwafina plays his best friend Katy. When his 1000 year old conqueror father and master of the Ten Rings comes to retrieve the amulets belonging to Shang-Chi and his sister, to free someone who he thinks is his dead wife from a dark portal guarded in a hidden village... Shang-Chi, Katy and his sister team up with his auntie, played by acting legend Michelle Yeoh, to try to stop his father from unleashing an evil, soul sucking force into the world. And... I wish I could say the story was more complex than that or had more twists and turns (especially since the movie runs for over two hours)... but it doesn’t.

It does have a lot of nice action set pieces though... not as fast or furious as I would have expected from a film which is presumably trying to match some of the classic Asian Kung-Fu based movies but... although this stuff was like a dialled back version of it, well it wasn’t too shabby in places. The most interesting fight scenes took place on a bus and then on scaffolding outside a big tower block and they were pretty good. However, that being said, they both take place in the first half of the movie and so, yeah, as much as they do try and pack a lot of action in, the climax of the movie does feel like a bit of a damp squib, it has to be said.

But there is some nice humour and also various references to some of the previous MCU films and also a few characters turning up from earlier parts of the franchise. This is where it gets properly spoilery people... you were warned. So we have Benedict Wong returning as Doctor Strange’s sidekick Wong, in a few scenes and it was nice seeing him again. We also have Ben Kingsley returning as Trevor Slattery, the Liverpudlian actor who was hired to be the face of The Mandarin in Iron Man 3 and the spin off short from that, All Hail The King. He gets some good moments where he mostly manages to win back some dignity, although the conversation about Planet Of The Apes, which shows how stupid he is, has to be one of the highlights of the film. Plus there’s a Black Widow (not the famous one) and The Abomination (played by Tim Roth... reprising the role from The Incredible Hulk and tying this into his re-emergence in next year’s She-Hulk TV show). There are also a couple of important characters in one of the end credits scenes.

So, okay, there are two end credits scenes in this one... one mid-credits and another end credits. Now, I really didn’t understand what the heck the final post-credit scene was trying to say but the mid-credits scene, set soon after Shang-Chi and Katy go to Wong’s Greenwich Village headquarters, has a couple of big characters. One is Brie Larson reprising her role as Captain Marvel and the other is Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner... which really had me baffled because... he is playing Bruce Banner, not the new hybrid version of the Hulk that he became in Avengers End Game. Now, we know this scene is post-End Game because, a) he is already friendly with Captain Marvel and b) he still has his arm in a sling from performing his Infinity Gauntlet snap in that movie. However, since we have not been given any insight that he can change back from the smarter Professor Hulk version of his character... and since we know from the trailers from the She-Hulk TV show that he very much is still the new version of his character... I have to ask what the heck is going on here? This makes no sense... and once again Marvel has lost my interest in the continuity stakes. I hope this gets addressed at some point but... what are the odds, right?

And that’s really all I have to say in this overly long review of an overly long movie. Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings is not terrible but it’s not great either. All the actors hold up really well, a lot of the sets and lighting are colourful, there are dragons and cute creatures but, ultimately, in between the bursts of humour and action, it does get a bit dull and ploddy and could maybe have benefited from being around 45 minutes to an hour lighter, I thought. I guess I have to look forward to The Eternals next but... so far, in terms of reportage from my friends, I haven’t heard anything good about it.

Avengers - Endgame

Snappy Endings

Avengers - Endgame
2019 USA Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo
UK cinema release print.

Pre Spoiler Warning Warning: Okay, so it’s not going to be that possible to point out at least one of the glaring faults with this movie without going into fairly mild spoiler territory to do with the story solution of this one but I’ll put a big warning sign up before the relevant paragraphs.

Okay so... I really loved the last Avengers movie, Infinity War (which I reviewed here) and was kinda looking forward to seeing the resolution to the ten years of Marvel Cinematic Universe which it’s all been leading up to. Alas, my best hope for this movie now is that, somehow, I flip flop on this film once I’ve processed all the information for a subsequent viewing. I’ve done this before in my reviews of Star Wars - The Force Awakens and Avengers - Age Of Ultron, where I didn’t much care for the films in question at all on the first watch but then loved them on subsequent viewings. So my fingers are kinda crossed that I can find something good in Avengers - Endgame on any further revisits but, in all honesty, my anger has been growing steadily since I watched this one.

I don’t understand how a creative team responsible for Avengers Infinity War, one of the most dramatic, hilarious and beautifully put together films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, can make a follow up movie which... well... is the opposite of all those things. Now I’m going to try and give as little away as possible until I get to the really unforgivable stuff, which I’ll put a warning on, but I’m going to try and find some nice things to say about this first.

Okay, so here goes with the nice things.

Um... performances were mostly good, which I’d expect from actors of this calibre who are used to these parts. However, I must say that the path they’ve gone down with both Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk/Banner character and Chris Hemsworth’s Thor character really didn’t amuse me. I thought their dialogue and story development was awful, considering how great these characters have been in the past... especially in movies like Thor Ragnarok (reviewed here) and the aforementioned Avengers - Infinity War.
Another nice thing was the opening of the movie (pre-title) and also the quick culmination of events to the Avengers finally doing some actual 'avenging.' The expected resolution to events is over within the first half an hour but, this brings its own consequences and I thought this was a brilliant piece of dramatic misdirection from the film-makers. Alas, this set of consequences kind of dictated a specific kind of solution so, pretty early on, you get a bit of an idea which direction this story is going to take. And take that option it does... failing quite spectacularly on the way.

Okay, onto the bad stuff...

Well I thought the character development between Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow and Banner was selling both of these people short. There has been a set up to their story arc in Avengers - Age Of Ultron and this has not been honoured, as far as I’m concerned.

I know a lot of audiences coming out of the initial screenings of this were saying it was a good film but with not very much action and, I’d have to say I do agree with the second part of that sentiment. Infinity War was filled with spectacle and action... Endgame, wasn’t. And when audiences did get to see the battle royale they had been expecting to turn up in the previous Avengers movie, it was quite badly edited, I thought. It was not put together nearly as well as the two, simultaneous conflicts that ended Infinity War and consequently, some pretty heroic and dramatic moments, which I’m sure looked great on paper, just felt a bit numbing. They didn’t want to make me cheer and, similar, certain moments in the film which people have said had them crying didn't affect me at all because I was already quite cross with the film by the time these scenes arrived. And I cry easily in movies, usually.




And a troubling loose end which seems to be left unanswered from Infinity War is this... Why does Thor's new axe Stormbreaker still have a handle when the rest of Groot turned into oatmeal after the finger snap in the last movie?

OKAY... SPOILER WARNING TIME.
EVERYTHING IN THE NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS COULD BE SEEN AS A SPOILER...

Okay, so if you guessed from the opening half hour that the rest of the movie must therefore involve time travel... yeah, you’d be right. And rather than bothering to think about things logically, these people make the same rudimentary mistakes to do with temporal mechanics that Back To The Future 2 famously did. If you stop a past version of someone from doing something that they will do by changing their path before they even do it, you can’t both have your cake and eat it by having that event still have taken place in the past. It’s impossible and it’s not rocket science. And, no, badmouthing the Back To The Future trilogy on screen in your movie does not give you carte blanche to make exactly the same mistakes in your own film, hoping people won’t notice. It’s preposterous. Even if you place certain key objects back the way you found them in the past... the focal point never gets to happen because that person is no longer around at that time. So immediately we have a paradox.

 And the idea of a person killing a past version of themselves when that past version comes into their own future? The person who killed that person would never have been there to pull the trigger and live to tell the tale because she never got to that point in the first place... her future self had already killed her. So, yeah, this movie really is a catalogue of schoolboy errors and I wish that was the only thing putting me off the movie because I’m more than happy to throw common sense out of the window for a bit but... the movie was so humdrum, especially the bulk of the dialogue which was nowhere near as sparkling and witty as Infinity War, which had me laughing a lot). This film kinda failed big for me, I’m less than happy to say.

OKAY, THAT”S THE END OF THE SPOILER ZONE. NORMAL SERVICE MAY NOW RESUME.

Alan Silvestri’s score was nice at some points but it didn’t have the emotional impact, for me, of the heroic version of his original Avengers theme which he used in the Scottish Train station scene in Infinity War. I am hoping to get to listen to this as a stand alone CD when it’s released in a while but I’m not that fussed about hearing it again at the moment, truth be told. But hopefully the score CD will be a bit of a revelation when I hear it without the distracting sound effects in the mix.

And... yeah, that’s me done, I think, on Avengers Endgame. I was really hoping this would be a good follow up to Infinity War but even Captain Marvel, who debuted only last month in her own feature film (reviewed here) was totally wasted in this one. She has, what amounts to a couple of basic cameo scenes, as far as I’m concerned and I was really expecting the Russos to make more of her in this. Alas, it was not to be and her status as a character seemed much diminished in this, I thought. There’s not much point in me saying steer clear of this one because this has a built in audience who wants to see what happened after Infinity War and, rightly so, is what I say. Personally I don’t think this movie is anywhere near top tier Marvel and if I was ranking these films it would be way down the bottom of the list along with the likes of Iron Man 2, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America - The First Avenger, Captain America - Civil War and Guardians Of The Galaxy Volume 2. As in... films I can tolerate to give me a greater appreciation of the better Marvel movies in the ‘three phases’ to date. It’s just a shame that such a major, concluding piece of the puzzle turned out to be a little more wanting in most departments than was usual, it has to be said.

Thor - Ragnarok

Ragnarok N’ Roll

Thor - Ragnarok
2017 USA Directed by Taika Waititi
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very minor ‘ish’ story spoilers, I suppose.

So here we go again with Thor - Ragnarok. It's yet another, fairly impressive, entry into Marvel’s strand of MCU films (Marvel Cinematic Universe) which all take place in a shared universe and have interlocking characters, themes and situations which build on and support each other. So, essentially, this is yet another sequel to Iron Man, even though Robert Downey Jr’s version of Tony Stark is only mentioned here and doesn’t actually appear in the flesh. Although there have been a few misses along the way... Iron Man 2 and the two Guardians Of The Galaxy films really didn’t do much for me, it has to be said (although I do like the characters in the GOTG films... just not the story ideas surrounding them)... the films are mostly solid and, musical continuity aside, the Marvel films in this sequence seem to have a knack for good casting (both in front of and behind the cameras). This latest installment is no exception to that rule. Sure, it’s certainly not the best of them but it’s definitely somewhere in the upper half of fun Marvel movies, I would say.

The previous two Thor ‘solo’ movies (if you can call this a solo adventure) were different in tone to each other and this third entry again changes the look and feel of the stories. Starting off with Thor imprisoned and talking to the a captive audience abut how he got in this predicament, I at first thought the majority of the running time was going to be one long flashback telling us how Thor got to this point and that the conclusion would lead on from here. Not so, though, and in the first of many surprises, we have a typical James Bondian ‘end of a mission’ moment when Thor talks to a big fiery devil creature and gains an inkling about the duplicity of Loki’s last trick, when it was revealed to the audience but not to Thor that Loki had replaced Zeus and was impersonating him to rule Asgard (at the end of Thor - The Dark World reviewed here). Thor then does battle with the monster and, when he finally gets back to Asgard, uncovers Loki tricksterism (in a nice scene which spoofs Loki’s fake death from Thor - The Dark World). After the two go to find Zeus, played once again by Anthony Hopkins and helped in their quest by a recent addition to the Marvel Universe, they learn that they have an older sister, Hela (played by the wonderful Cate Blanchett), who was banished by Zeus in days gone by. She is the Goddess of Death and she’s pretty powerful.

In a mini showdown, Hela destroy’s Thor’s hammer and, while he and Loki are fleeing to Asgard, she follows them up the Bifrost and both Thor and Loki are thrown from that mode of transport into a random part of the Universe where Thor is taken prisoner by Jeff Goldblum’s ‘Grandmaster’ and forced to fight in the arena against... The Incredible Hulk. However, he has to find a way back to Asgard and so he teams up with Loki, Valkyrie and Hulk/Banner to try to make things right. And that’s the plot set up and that’s all I’m saying about it here... which is pretty much what you can gather from the trailer anyway.

So we have Chris Hemsworth back as Thor and Tom Hiddleston back as Loki and, frankly, the chemistry between them is great. We also have one of my favourite modern actors, Mark Ruffalo, back as Bruce Banner/Hulk and he’s always a fun watch but he’s mostly back as Hulk here, rather than in his human form. The Hulk character has, as you will have seen from the trailers, finally ‘found his voice’, so to speak and is more in keeping with the original comics in this way. I think the character also looks a lot more like Ruffalo here and, maybe I’m wrong here but his head seems to have grown smaller in size too? Seems to have been redesigned. We also have Tessa Thompson who seems miscast, racially, as the blonde haired, Wagnerian styled Valkyrie from the 1970s comics, although I don’t know if she’s been revamped in recent comics like the Nick Fury character was so I might just be showing my age here. Away from the ‘look’ of the character, though, she does do pretty well here and creates an entertaining screen personae but, again, she seems far removed from being The Enchantress as she ‘kinda/also’ was in the early 70s comics.

Idris Elba returns as Heimdall, partaking in some nice heroics and there are also a couple of special cameos here from Sam Neil and Luke ‘brother of Chris’ Hemsworth which provide a great moment when Thor gets back to Asgard. Karl Urban also turns up (although I didn’t actually recognise him, which shows just how good of an actor he is) as a... well he’s definitely someone you have to keep an eye on. He’s not a black and white character by any means, even though he’s still a quick sketch of one... in terms of the film moving at a very fast pace. My favourite new character here, though, was easily a rock creature called Korg who definitely gets all the best laughs in the movie... so I was surprised to learn later that he’d been played by the director, Taika Waititi.

And when I say he got the best laughs...

Thor - Ragnarok shouldn’t really work as well as it does here and this is due to the tone of this one. I mentioned earlier that the previous Thor movies seemed to have a slightly different tone but this one is a complete ‘about face’ to the way in which the characters were presented in the previous Thor adventures. In fact, this one is pretty much written as a comedy all the way through. The scripting pretty much consists of a load of jokes and one liners thrown together and, although a lot of it was apparently improvised on set for this particular film, it really works quite well for most of the time.

Now, you’d think that such an out and out comedy treatment of the subject matter might trivialise the story arc of the ‘big picture’ the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been building towards completing over the next two years but it really doesn’t fall into any of the traps it could have been tripped up with and the tone of the piece never really interferes with the tone and credibility of the established characters (for the most part... I’ll get to my one big complaint in a minute). Furthermore, although comedy is the order of the day in this one, you never really feel like it’s watering down the stakes which are quite high here. It’s also quite edgy in something it does to one of the characters and I realised at one point in the film that one of the scenes used in the trailers must have been shot twice (once with and once without... something) or at least had some heavy CGI work done on it in order to not reveal something which will be a permanent change to one of the regular characters in the MCU.

My one big problem here was the Banner/Hulk character... not in terms of acting but in terms of scripting. For starters, Banner’s few scenes in the movie seem to be really ‘out of character’ to me and it’s like he’s gone completely mad. I understand that after being ‘imprisoned’ in the Hulk’s body for two years the character might return a little dazed and confused but something about the writing here just didn’t seem to ring true to the excellent work Ruffalo has done with Bruce Banner in previous films in the series. Also... and I may be completely wrong about this... but isn’t the continuity completely wrong here. I thought the jet that Hulk used to escape in Avengers - Age Of Ultron (reviewed here) was found or tracked to a specific place on Earth, although Hulk was not found. Or did I remember that wrong because... that’s not in the back story here. The jet seems to have ended up somewhere completely different and ‘off world’. Also, the character makes reference to having been on another planet other than Earth and the one he’s currently on here and Thor seems to remember this too. Well, I don’t. When the heck did this happen in the intervening movies? So I was finding myself very puzzled during some scenes here.

Also, while I'm on the subject of continuity. If Thor was in a happy relationship with Natalie Portman's character still when he left Earth in Avengers - Age Of Ultron... how can they have had any time to 'split up', as is stated here, when he hasn't been back to Earth since then until a certain scene in this film? That makes no sense. Honestly Marvel, if you find yourself in the position where you have to write a character out because they don't want to do anymore, you could at least make it a little more credible.

However, this is all just minor stuff and, in terms of broad strokes, Thor - Ragnarok is definitely one of the better entries in the MCU. Mark Mothersbaugh’s score is nicely done too (although I would have liked to have heard what Brian Tyler might have done with this one) and there’s even a nice musical cameo from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, if I’m not much mistaken. If you’re a fan/follower’/true believer’ of the Marvel movies then you really need to see this... especially since it helps set up (as do they all, I guess), next year’s Avengers - Infinity War. It’s perhaps more married, in terms of the kind of comedy action style it has here, to the two Guardians Of The Galaxy movies but it doesn’t seem to make the same mistakes that those two did (for me) and this one was a much more positive experience. And, like I said, the stakes are high in this one and, by the end of the story, you definitely feel that various things have been changed forever in the wake of this movie. Things which certainly, in some ways, live up to the movie’s subtitle of Ragnarok. My big question of the writers, though, is this... where the heck is Lady Sif these days?

Now You See Me 2

Now You Don’t

Now You See Me 2
2016 USA Directed by Jon M. Chu
UK cinema release print.

Okay then. I was quite harsh on the first film in this series, Now You See Me, when I reviewed it (right here) because of the usual “I saw that coming” predictable nature of the movie. That being said, I was also pretty positive about it, called it for what it was... an extremely entertaining movie... and was happy to watch it a second time. The sequel is a similar affair, in some respects... except it more than lives up to the high standard of the first movie. I won’t go so far as to call it a better movie than the first... but I will say it is at least its equal in many respects. If ever there was a sequel that truly follows the first movie, continues the main themes and builds on that story arc to a certain extent, this movie is it.

However, now I’ve said all that, there’s a real problem with this film before you even go to the cinema to see it... the title.

I remember I was at Brian Tyler’s debut concert in London, earlier in the year (reviewed by me here) and I saw/heard him premiere a suite of music from his score to this movie. As he started playing, the title of the movie was revealed to be... something other than Now You Don’t. Seriously people? You have the perfect title for a sequel implied by the opening half of a well known phrase used for the first movie and, instead of following it up with the expectation of a movie called Now You Don’t, you call it Now You See Me 2? I mean, c’mon? How dumb is that? It niggles me but I know some people who are really angry that the studios let it go out under this title. It really insults the audience too but... well, I guess the suits at Hollywood have a pretty good track record for insulting their audience, as they always have had.

Okay, so before I go on to point out why, even with a completely different director than the first magical confection, this film is another little slice of genius... let me get to the bad or slightly disappointing stuff first. Number one of which is a repeat of the main flaw of the first movie in that, certain elements of the story are actually quite obvious and predictable. There’s a major figure in the first movie, and I won’t say who because I don’t want to spoil this for anyone, who turns out to be not what he seemed in the previous one. It’s kind of a twist reveal near the end of the picture, once the main plot is all wrapped up, and the problem is that most people will probably see that coming a mile off. Also, like the first film, the very nature of the illusion (both real and created by the camera to con you it’s plausible), is such that, as an audience, you don’t take anything you see for granted and so, the tension and suspense I suspect you’re supposed to feel as the main plot comes to its conclusion, isn’t in any way unexpected... it’s sad to say.

My third disappointment with the film is that the two female leads from the previous movie, Mélanie Laurent and Isla Fisher (the lady horseman), are not present in this one. Which is a shame as they were both so fantastic in the first one. So there’s that. However, we have the brilliant Lizzy Caplan, who I loved in Cloverfield, playing Lula (the new lady horseman) and she’s just as amazing in this. Also, we have Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe, playing the main villain of the piece along with another character from the first film. So there’s also that.

And the cast is great. I’ve already shouted out Caplan and Radcliffe but they’re joined by the main regulars of the previous movie in the form of Mark Ruffalo, Jesse Eisenberg, Dave Franco, Woody Harrelson, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman... who are all as brilliant as you would imagine them to be. We also have new cast members Tsai Chin (who was a regular in some of those old Christopher Lee Fu Manchu movies), Jay Chou and the lovely Sanaa Lathan... all thrown into the mix with them and who are all, also, just as great in this. So there’s even that, too.

It’s not just this stuff that makes the movie so brilliant, though. There’s that same, very fast moving camerawork that was a stylistic trait of the first movie, coupled with some really sharp dialogue writing, spectacular set pieces, lots of hokum and, for the most part, action sequences which don’t involve car chases and shooting at people. It’s all good and it ties itself to the original movie straight away by giving us a very strong opening sequence, which is a closer look at the back story of Mark Ruffalo’s character, on the fateful day which set his original 30 year plan of revenge in motion. So, yeah, this film really works right from the opening shots and Brian Tyler’s incredible score.

And talking of Brian Tyler and his toe tapping, amazing score for this movie... I was pretty sure I spotted Mr. Tyler himself in a 'blink and you’ll miss him' cameo as a guy who checks and straightens Jesse Eisenberg’s tray in an early scene in the film... it’s only for a few seconds of screen time but... yeah. He’s not listed as being in it, in either the credits or the IMDB, but... pretty sure that’s him.

The really brilliant bit for me, though, is that the writers and director managed to completely misdirect my attention for a lot of the movie... which is quite appropriate but completely surprising to me for a film which is about nothing but misdirection. Again, I don’t want to say too much but one of the actors playing one of the horsemen has a certain element to his character which turns up in the film fairly early on in the proceedings and it’s like this thing is deliberately put there to make people like me realise it’s a set up and wait throughout the whole movie, and I did, for the writers to yank that string and use his character to bring in a twist. And the joke's on us because, with such an obvious and stupid set up for a character... the string is never pulled. It’s just a distraction to get you thinking about other things while the writers try to surprise you (mostly unsuccessfully, granted) with other stuff happening in the script. However, the fact that they got me thinking deliberately in another direction wins the writers a lot of brownie points here, as far as I’m concerned. It’s a brilliant and, possibly far too obvious, set up and the film is a lot smarter than that, it turns out. Not smart enough to be called Now You Don’t but, yeah, at least smart enough to fool me for a good long while. So well done on that score people... I was totally expecting ‘that’ character to be used as a switch later on.

And that’s it for Now You See Me 2. If you liked the first movie in this franchise, all I can say is that it certainly doesn’t let the first one down and, I suspect, a lot of people may like this one even more. There are some stupidly impossible illusions and real clichés of things magicians do here but, ultimately, it’s a really well oiled machine that is a joy to watch and it kept me thoroughly entertained the whole way through. Also, I loved the ending and the return of a trend to cinema of a secret organisation working behind the scenes that the law is unable to touch. The Eye, who we heard about in the first film, is not exactly Fantomas or Diabolik... but it’s similar in style to the spirit of Judex and, well... that can’t be a bad thing, I think.